


To Wish Impossible Things

by requiembycandlelight



Category: Watchmen (2009), Watchmen (Comic)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Canonical Character Death, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Introspection, Mentioned other characters - Freeform, Multi, One Shot, Period-Typical Language, Post-Canon, more like i wrote this while waiting for a 3am ride to the airport, no beta we die like men, or in this case like rorschach and half of new york, real talk i didn't reread so there may be errors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:00:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27705907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/requiembycandlelight/pseuds/requiembycandlelight
Summary: Dan's not quite unhappy, he's just not quite as happy as he used to be when he thought they were all saving the world.
Relationships: Dan Dreiberg & Rorschach, Dan Dreiberg/Laurie Juspeczyk
Kudos: 1





	To Wish Impossible Things

**Author's Note:**

> You know it's going to be pretentious when we steal titles from songs by The Cure. That aside, it's one of the least pretentious things I've written. Disclaimer I own none of these characters (duh). The idea's not even very original.

He hated how different things were. How much more different they both could and couldn't be. How different things should have been when they weren't. He had read clippings from lurid magazines, anonymous confessions from guys who fucked women but were always thinking "If only. If only her hands were rougher; if only she were taller, shoulders broader. This is nice, but something else..."  
Dan felt guilty for that last bit, even if all the others didn't add up. Laurie could be plenty rough -- plenty strong -- and he didn't want her any different, but there was just that something else. It was unsettling that he, with all his diplomas and fancy gadgets and years of bird-watching turned to people-watching, couldn't put a finger on just what it was. He tried what the columnist (either an aging queen or closeted fag-hag, he couldn't quite tell) suggested and looked at guys, but none of them had it, either. They had it even less than Laurie. To be honest, he didn't even think it was a sex thing, because he couldn't even wrap his head around that with anyone but her, especially the pumped and waxed centerfolds who looked like they took Adrian's mail-in course a little too seriously. (Twilight Lady, growled the back of his mind, but that was beside the point.)  
There was just a void at his side; a little space that should have been filled in the sleepless hours by 120 pounds of rage, judgement, and butterflied ink. "What's black and white and red all over?"  
Dan had said that to him once, fetching band-aids and hydrogen peroxide in the odd lightness just before dawn. The ink blots shifted, somewhere between his skeptical and confused faces, and then "Unhelpful, Daniel." Then an afterthought, a hint of what Dan would have called mirth from anyone else, "Suit's purple."  
He could have pointed out the extrapolated ginger-ness -- enough nights had been spent with a first aid-kit in hand peering close to scabbed and rust-freckled skin, or tactfully pretending he wasn't looking (he was) when the mask was pulled above orange stubble that it wouldn't be a surprise -- but he knew the mention of anything that wasn't his second skin was enough to guarantee the few words Dan was allotted were cut to zero.  
That was another thing. Laurie always, always knew what to say. She would be ready with a "Goodnight," or "I love you," or some factoid about her day or nights past, depending on what she thought he needed to hear. But that wasn't what he needed, he wasn't John. Of course, he had said that once and she had gotten mad, saying that at least with John she knew what was and wasn't normal, and that John didn't compare her to a sadistic little creep instead of just being her boyfriend. Dan had slept in Archie that night, which hadn't helped much, and apologized as soon as both of them had their coffee, but really she had a point. Knowing that didn't change the fact that sometimes he missed conversation half-made up of awkward silences and grunts only differing in tonality.  
Maybe if he had been John, he could have found some way to have everything he wanted, but that was a train of thought that led nowhere good real fast. All he could do now was screw around with crap that didn’t mean so much when it was just him using it. She used it sometimes, too, but that wasn’t filling an empty space so much as working in a new one. If Dan had been one for melodrama, he’d say it was hollowing out another hole that could never be filled in; but he wasn’t, so he didn’t, and he let her even though it still wasn’t the same.   
Well, he had been a bit melodramatic the last time Adrian tried to call. Laurie had been upset but Dan, oh Dan saw red. Adrian had been gifted with a beautiful body, a brilliant mind, the vocabulary to discuss the deepest philosophical ideas in a dozen languages -- half of which no one alive even knew of outside of academia – but still he could not fathom such deep an complex emotions for a single, or even a handful, of individuals. It still irked Dan to think of the honest shock in Adrian’s voice when he turned down dinner invitations on the basis that he was a “Mass-murdering sociopath and incorrigible narcissist with no respect for human, superhuman, nor alien life.”   
Adrian only had time for an exasperated “Daniel—” before he had slammed the phone down and left Laurie confused in favour of seething and banging a new night-vision filter around considerably harder than it should have been. He wasn’t in the mood for a “Really, Dan, you of all people should see that what we –” Oh, how magnanimous that We was after the fact – “sacrificed brought about a change that none of our forebears, including your Hollis, could ever have imagined…” blah blah blah blah blah. All Dan wanted was his partner back. He had gotten it for such a short time before the Great Ozymandias and his Master Plan to Save Humanity from Itself ripped it back out of his hands. (Secretly, Dan blamed John, too, for his spine and his moral compass vaporized years ago.)  
But he was just Daniel Dreiberg, who knew the Latin name by a bird’s wingspan and how to throw a damn football. Or he was NiteOwl II, who never did quite as well with Silk Specter as he had before, though he was quick to say it was no fault of hers. He wrote papers, fucked Laurie, tinkered around with Archie, wrote a thousand letters to R, R, R… but always, always missed that something else.


End file.
